Smilla's Sense of Snow aka Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

4

I've chosen a tuxedo jacket with wide lapels of green silk. Black pants that go to just below my knees, green stockings, and small green Daisy Duck shoes, and a little velvet fez over my bald spot.

The problem with a woman wearing a tuxedo is always what to wear over it. I have a thin white Burberry raincoat over my shoulders. But I've also told the mechanic that I want to be driven right inside the building.

We drive along Østerbro Street and then along Strand Drive. He's wearing a tux, too. In a different mood I inight have noticed that it's the largest size you can buy off the rack, and thus five sizes too small, and it also looks like something from the Salvation Army and does more harm than good. But we've gotten too close to each other. Even now, squeezed into his tux, he reminds me of a butterfly on his way out of a black cocoon.

He doesn't look in my direction. He looks in the rearview mirror. His driving is still fluid and relaxed. But his eyes are memorizing the cars behind and in front of us.

We turn down Sund Lane, one of the little side roads off Strand Drive, toward the Sound. At one time the road ended at a garden gate leading out to the beach. Now it ends at a high yellow-brick wall and a white crossing gate with a glass booth. A man in uniform takes our passes and pulls up our names on a screen and opens the gate and lets us drive to the next gate, where a woman in a similar uniform accepts 250 kroner apiece and admits us into a parking lot, where we pay an attendant 75 kroner for him to sneer shamelessly at the Morris, which he now takes care of so that we can walk through a revolving door in a marble faqade, up to a cloakroom where we sacrifice another 50 kroner apiece so that a blonde, who carries herself so that we can look right up her nose, will take our coats.

In front of a mirror that covers an entire wall, I repair a little damage with a lipstick, grateful that I used the bathroom at home. At least I won't have to find out how much it costs to pee.

The mechanic stands next to me, gazing at his own reflection as if it belonged to some stranger. We're in the foyer of Casino Øresund, Denmark's twelfth, newest, and most prestigious casino. A place that I've heard about but never expected to set foot in.

This is where Birgo Lander has summoned us, and now he appears. Dressed in white shoes, white trousers with a light blue stripe down the leg, dark blue blazer, gray turtleneck sweater, silk scarf with little embroidered anchors, and a little, white yachting cap. His eyes are glassy, his walk slightly unsteady, and he's as radiant as the sun. With both hands he carefully straightens my white bow tie.

"You look unusually delicious tonight, sweetie."

"You don't look so bad yourself. Is that your Sea Scout uniform?"

He stiffens for a second. Only twelve hours have passed since we last met. But he has already forgotten the sensation.

Then he smiles at the mechanic. "She has a blank check to my heart."

They shake hands, and once again I note the almost imperceptible change in the shipowner. For a moment, while he's holding the mechanic's hand, his drunkenness and his self-styled, meticulously cultivated vulgarity give way to a gratitude bordering on adoration. Then he shows us inside.

I will never learn to be comfortable in ritzy places. With every step I take, I have the feeling that someone might appear at any moment to tell me that I have no right to be here. The mechanic isn't coping much better. He is slinking along several yards behind us, trying to pull his head down between his shoulders. Birgo Lander saunters along as if he owns the place.

"Did you know that I own a piece of the pie, sweetie? Don't you read the papers? Together with Unibank, which financed Marienlyst, and Casino Austria, which runs the casino at the Hotel Scandinavia and the ones in Arhus and Odense. I did it to keep myself from gambling. The owners are never allowed to play in their own casinos. The same is true for the croupiers and the dealers. Austria puts out a book with their photographs, and none of them can gamble at any of the company's other casinos, either."

He leads us through the restaurant. It's a large round room with a dance floor in the middle. In the background there's a long, dimly lit bar. On a raised platform a jazz quartet is playing, soft and anonymous. The tablecloths are pale yellow, the walls cream-colored, the bar stainless steel. All the walls are decorated with rivets, and the door Frames are three feet thick and furnished with bolts. The whole thing is designed to resemble a safe, and it's solid, expensive, and as oppressively cold and alienating as an end-of-the-season dance in a bank vault. Part of one wall lias windows facing the water. You can see the lights of Sweden and the other wing of'the casino with the gamWing rooms, illuminated like glass cages; jutting out into the water. Beneath the windows you can make out the gray ice floes along the frozen shore.

The mechanic falls behind. Lander takes my arm. Past us glide women in decollete gowns and gentlemen in tuxedos, gentlemen in lavender shirts and white dinner jackets, gentlemen in chamois T-shirts with gold Rolex watches and sun-bleached hair.

The room is an oval with a wall of glass, like a black barrier, facing the water. The only light comes from the dim lamps over the gaming tables. There are four curved blackjack tables and two big roulette wheels. A velvet rope hangs between the tables creating an enclosure. Behind it sit three chief croupiers, one at the card games, the others each in a tall chair, one at the end of the French roulette table and one at the American. There is an inspector for every two tables, a croupier at each table.

There is such a crowd of people that you can't see the playing surfaces. The only sound is the soft clicking of the chips being stacked up and the voices of the croupiers.

The gamblers are all men. A few Asian women are sitting at the tables. A few European women are watching without playing. The room is tense with deep concentration. The players' faces are pale in the light, absorbed, enraptured.

Occasionally a figure tears himself away from the table and disappears past us. Several with bowed heads, others with shining eyes, but most of them neutral, preoccupied. Several say hello to Lander; no one notices me.

"They don't see me," I say.

He squeezes my arm. "You've been to school, honey, you remember what men look like inside. Heart, brain, liver, kidneys, stomach, testicles. When they come in here, a change takes place. The moment you buy your chips, a little animal takes up residence inside you, a little parasite. Finally there's nothing left but the attempt to remember what cards have been dealt, the attempt to feel where the ball will fall, the probability of certain card combinations, and the memory of how much you have lost."

We look at the faces around the table he has led me to. They're like empty shells. At that moment it's practically impossible to imagine that they have any life outside of this room. Maybe they don't.

"That parasite, it's the gambling bug, honey. One of the most voracious creatures in the world. And I know what I'm talking about. I've lost everything several times over. But I got back on my feet again. That's why I had to buy into it. It's different now that I'm an owner, now that I've looked behind the scenes."

The crowd opens up a bit, and the green felt comes into view. The croupier is a young blond woman with long red nails who speaks perfect, slightly nasal English.

"Buying in? Forty-five thousand goes down. One, two, three…"

A few of the guests have mineral water in front of them. No one is drinking alcohol.

"That bug comes in various sizes, honey. It's different for each person. That guy over there…"

He's been speaking in a low whisper and he doesn't point, but I know he's talking about the man sitting to one side of us. He has a perfect Slavic face, like one of the ballet dancers who defected in the seventies. High cheekhones, straight black hair. His hands are resting on stacks of colored chips. He doesn't move a muscle. His attention is directed toward the card shoe next to the dealer, as if he is now focusing all his energy to influence the outcome of the game.

"Possible blackjack. Insurance, gentlemen? Sixteen. Would you like a hit? Seventeen, nineteen, too many… "

"A parasite that has eaten him up from the inside and now takes up more room than he does. He comes here cvery night until he has lost everything. Then he works for six months. Then he comes back and loses it all."

He presses his mouth to my ear. "Captain Sigmund Lukas. Last week he lost the last of it. Had to borrow money from me for a pack of cigarettes and a cab home."

His age is indeterminate. He might be in his mid-thirties to mid-forties. Maybe he's fifty. As I watch him, he wins and rakes a tall stack of chips toward him.

"Each chip is worth 5,000 kroner. We had them made last month. Each table has a different limit. This is the high-roller table. Minimum bet 1,000 kroner, maximum 20,000. With the right to double down, and with an average playing time of a minute and a half per deal, it means that you can win or lose 100,000 kroner in five minutes."

"If he's broke, whose money is he playing with today?"

"Today he's playing with Uncle Lander's money, honey."

He pulls me along with him. We stand with our backs to the bar. A tall, frosted glass is placed next to him. It has been in the freezer and is covered with a thin layer of ice, which now melts and starts to slide off. It's full of a clear, amber-colored liquid.

"Bullshot, honey. Eight parts vodka, eight parts beef bouillon."

He ponders something.

"Take a look at our customers. There are all kinds of people. A lot of lawyers come here. Quite a few contractors. Several boys who have a fat allowance from home. The heavy artillery of the Danish underworld. They can walk right up and exchange whatever they want for chips. And we haven't given in to the vice squad's demands to record the serial numbers on the bills. That's why this shop is one of the most important money-laundering centers for drug money. And then there's the little yellow-skinned ladies who run the organized prostitution with Thai and Burmese girls. There are quite a few businessmen and several doctors. There are some who travel around the world gambling. Last week a Norwegian shipowner was here. Today he might be in Travemunde. Next week Monte Carlo. In one day he won four and a half million. It was in the newspapers."

He empties his glass and pushes it aside. It's replaced with a full one.

"Such different people. But they have one thing in common. They're losers, Smilla. In the long run they all lose. This shop has two winners, the owners and the state. We have eight bureaucrats from the tax authorities here at all times. They change-like our croupiers-from the day to the evening shift, and finally to a `count' shift when the accounts are reconciled from three in the morning onward. There are also plainclothes police and plainclothes inspectors from the Internal Revenue Service who, like our own security people, make sure that the croupiers don't cheat, don't mark the cards, and don't make side bets with the guests. We're taxed according to our turnover by one of the world's toughest tax regulations on gambling. And yet in the casino's gambling rooms alone we have 290 employees: managers, dealers, head croupiers, security people, technical staff, and inspectors. In the restaurant and the nightclub there are an additional 250: cooks, waiters, bartenders, hostesses, bouncers, cloakroom attendants, show managers, inspectors, and the full-time hookers we also control. Do you know why we can afford to pay salaries to so many people? Just between you and me, it's because we make such a huge amount of dough off the people who gamble. For the government this sewer is the biggest sucker game since they put a toll on all ships passing through the Sound in the Middle Ages. On the following day the Norwegian shipowner lost what he had won. But we didn't leak that to the newspapers. There was a Thai bordello madam who dropped 500,000 kroner three times last week. She comes here every night. Every time she sees me she begs me to have the place closed down. As long as it exists, she won't have any peace: She has to come here. Before us there were illegal joints, of course. But that wasn't the same thing. It was mostly poker, which is slower and requires some knowledge of odds. Legalization has changed that. It's like an infectious disease that was once under control but has now been let loose. Here comes a young man who has built up a painting company. He never gambled until someone brought him in here. Now lie's losing everything. It cost 100 million kroner to build and furnish this place. But it's a gilded piece of shit."

"But you've got money in it," I say.

"Maybe I'm a rotten apple myself."

I've always been fascinated by the melancholy shamelessness with which Danes accept the enormous gap between their common sense and fheir actions.

"It's a business like this one that creates a case like Lukas. A very, very skillful seaman. Sailed his own little coaster in Greenland for years. After that he was responsible for building up a fishing fleet near Mbengano in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Tanzania, as part of the biggest Scandinavian project to aid developing countries. Never drinks. Knows the North Atlantic like no one else. Some people say he's even fond of it. But he gambles. That little bug has emptied him out. He no longer has a family or a home. And now he's reached the point where he's for sale. If the amount is big enough."

We go over to the table. A man who looks like a butcher is sitting next to Captain Lukas. We stand there for maybe ten minutes. In that time he loses 120,000 kroner.

A new dealer comes up behind the woman with the red nails and taps her lightly on the shoulder of her black coatdress. Without turning around she finishes the game. Sigmund Lukas wins-as far as I can tell, about 30,000 kroner. The butcher loses the last of the chips in front of him. He gets up, his face expressionless.

Red Nails introduces her successor. A young man with the same superficial charm and politeness that she possesses. "Ladies and gentlemen, here is a new dealer. Thank you."

"Would you like to play, honey?"

He's holding a stack of chips between his thumb and forefinger.

I think about the 120,000 that the butcher lost. The annual net salary for one of us ordinary Danes. Five times the annual salary of one of us ordinary Inuits. Never in my life have I seen such disrespect for money.

"You can flush them down the toilet," I say. "At least there you have the pleasure of hearing the flush."

He shrugs. For the first time Captain Lukas lifts his cat eyes from the felt and looks at us. He scrapes up his chips, stands up, and leaves.

We slowly follow him.

"Are you doing this for my sake?" I ask Lander.

He takes my arm, and now his expression turns serious. "I like you, honey, but I love my wife. I'm doing this for Føjl's sake."

He thinks for a moment. "You can't say much good about me. I drink too much. I smoke too much. I work too much. I neglect my family. Yesterday, as I was lying in the bathtub, my oldest came in and stared at me and said, `Dad, where do you live?' My life isn't worth much. But whatever it's worth, I owe to that little Føjl."

Captain Lukas is waiting in a small glass veranda that juts out over the water. I sink down onto the bench on the other side of the table; the mechanic materializes out of the blue and slips in next to me. Lander remains standing, leaning against the table. Behind him a female waiter closes a sliding door. We're alone in a little glass box that seems to be floating on the Sound. Lukas has turned away from us. In front of him there is a cup with a black fluid that smells strongly of coffee. He's chain-smoking. Not once does he look at us. The words drip bitterly and reluctantly from his lips, like the juice from an unripe lime. He has a slight accent. I guess that he's Polish.

"One night in the winter they come to me here, maybe at the end of November. A man and a woman: They ask me how I feel about the sea north of Godthab in March. `Just like everybody,' I say. `I think it's hell.' Then we part. Last week they came back. Now my situation has changed. They ask me again. I try to tell them about the pack ice. About the `Iceberg Cemetery.' About the waters along the coast that are so full of drift ice and calving icebergs and ice avalanches.that go straight from the glaciers into the sea that even the Americans' nuclear-powcred icebreaker Northwind from the Thule base ventures through only every third or fourth winter. They pay no attention. They already know all about it. `How good are you?' they ask. `How good is your checkbook?' I say." "Any name? Any company?"

"Only the ship. A coaster. Four thousand tons. Kronos. Docked in South Harbor. They bought it and had it revamped. It's just come from the shipyard."

"Crew?"

"Ten men, I hire them."

"Cargo?"

He looks at Lander. The ship broker doesn't move. The situation is unclear. Up until now I thought he was telling me this because Lander had pressured him. Now that I see him close up, I drop that idea. Lukas doesn't take orders from anyone. Except maybe that bug inside.

"I don't know what the cargo is."

Bitterness bordering on self-hatred makes him rock back and forth for a moment.

"Equipment?" It's the mechanic who has spoken all of a sudden.

He holds off answering for a long time.

"An LMC," he says. "I've bought one of the navy's discards for them."

He puts out his cigarette in the coffee.

"The shipyard has equipped her with large booms. A crane. Special reinforcement in the forward cargo hold." He stands up. I follow him. I want to get him out of earshot, but the glass cage is so small that we've reached the wall almost at once. We stand so close to the glass that our breath forms fleeting white circles.

"Can I come aboard?"

He thinks for a moment. When he answers I realize that he misunderstood the question.

"I still need a stewardess."

The door slides open. In the opening stands a man with broad gray shoulders in a coat that a guest with less authority would have been forced to leave in the cloakroom.

It's Ravn.

"Miss Smilla. May I have a few words with you?" Everyone stares at him, and he bears their glances the way he presumably bears everything else, with rock-hard equanimity.

I walk several paces behind him. No one could tell that we know each other. He leads me down a wide corridor with plants and clusters of leather sofas. At the end is a hall full of slot machines. They're all in use.

A young man gives up his machine for us. He takes up a position some distance away and stands there.

Ravn takes a roll of 20-krone coins out of his coat pocket. "It would please me to have my wallet back." He's standing with his back to me, playing the machine.

"I have a regular shift here one day a week," he says. I can just barely hear his voice over the hum of the machine.

"Were we followed out here?"

At first he doesn't answer. "They're looking for you. The word went out fifteen minutes ago."

Now it's my turn to say nothing.

"There are always a dozen plainclothes officers on duty at this place. Plus our own representatives. If you stay here, you only have a few minutes of freedom. If you leave right now, I might be able to delay things a little."

I slip his wallet in front of him, along with a photograph and a newspaper clipping. He takes them without moving his eyes from the machine. His wallet disappears into one pocket and he glances at the photo and clipping. When he reaches back to hand me the clipping, the photo is gone. He shakes his head.

"I've done what I could," he says. "And what you haven't been given, you've taken yourself. Now it has to stop."

"I want to know," I say. "I'll do anything. Including selling you to the Toenail."

"The Toenail?"

"That flat, hard detective who keeps turning up."

He laughs for the first time. Then his smile is gone, as if it had never existed. His image in the glass in front of him is a lifeless reflection against the machine's multicolored, wildly spinning cylinders. But when he speaks I know that I've hit home somehow.

"Chiang Rai, on the border between Cambodia, Laos, and Burma. The region is dominated by feudal princes. The most powerful is Khum Na. A standing army of 6,000 men. Offices all over the Far East and in major Western cities. Regulates the entire world trade in heroin. Tørk Hviid worked in Chiang Rai."

"Doing what?"

"He's a microbiologist, specializing in radiation mutations. All the processing of opium poppies is located up in that area. They're said to have the most modern laboratories of their kind in the world. In the middle of the jungle. Hviid worked on the irradiation of the poppy seed in an attempt to improve yield. There were rumors that he had created a new type, mayam, which-in its raw, boiled-down, but not yet crystallized state-was twice as strong as any heroin known."

"How does this concern you Ravn? Is the fraud division interested in narcotics?" He doesn't answer.

"Katja Claussen?"

"Originally an antiques dealer. Sometime in 1990 or '91 it was discovered that throughout the eighties most of the heroin coming into the U.S. and Europe had been smuggled inside antiques."

"Seidenfaden?"

"Transport. An engineer specializing in transport assignments. Arranged for the transport of antiques from the Far East for various companies. For a while he was in charge of a veritable airlift from Singapore via Japan to Switzerland, Germany, and Copenhagen. In order to avoid the risky air space over the Middle East."

"Why aren't they in prison?"

"The powerful and the talented are seldom punished. Now you have to go, Miss Smilla."

I stay put.

"What was Freia Film?"

His hand freezes on the chrome handle. Then he nods wearily.

"A film company that was a cover for German intelligence activities both before and during the occupation of Denmark. Under the pretext of filming footage to support Horbinger's Thule theory, they organized two expeditions to Greenland. Their real purpose was to investigate the feasibility of occupying Greenland, especially the two cryolite quarries, to secure for Germany the production of aluminum, which was so crucial to the aircraft industry. They also did surveys with the intention of establishing air bases that could serve as supply links for a possible invasion of the U.S."

"Was Loyen a Nazi?"

"Loyen was and is obsessed with fame. Not politics."

"What did he discover in Greenland, Ravn?"

He shakes his head. "Nobody knows. Put it out of your mind."

Now he looks at me. "Go visit a girl friend. Think up a plausible explanation for why you were on board that boat. Then turn yourself in to the police. Get a good lawyer. You'll be free in two days. Forget about the rest."

He sticks his hand out behind him. In his palm there is a cassette tape. "I took this from your apartment. To protect you in case of a search."

I reach for it, but he hides it away. "Why are you doing this, Ravn?"

He gazes at the machine's spinning wheels. "Let's just say that I don't care for the insufficiently explained deaths of little children."

I wait, but nothing more comes from him. Then I turn around and leave. At that moment he wins. Like a metallic vomiting, the robot emits a stream of coins with a spitting clink that goes on and on behind me.

I pick up my coat from the cloakroom. My temples are pounding. Now everyone seems to be staring at me. I look around for the mechanic. I hope he has a plan. Most men know everything about sneaking around, making excuses, taking off. But the foyer is empty. Except for me and the cloakroom woman, who looks more serious than she ought to, considering that she takes 50 kroner for hanging people's coats on a hanger.

At that moment I hear the laughter. Loud, harrowing, sonorous. It segues right into the trumpet, a wild, bleating attack that drops at once to a lower pitch, more suitable to the setting. But by then I've recognized the sound.

I don't have much time. I make my way through the tables and cross the empty dance floor. The three white musicians behind him are wearing pale yellow tux jackets and have faces like white dumplings. He's wearing tails. He is tremendously fat, his face a black orb of sweat, his big eyes bloodshot and protruding, as if they were trying to escape the lethal percentage of alcohol in his skull. He looks like what he is: a colossus on a pedestal that has already dissolved and disappeared.

But the music is undiminished. Even now, as he plays with a mute, it has an overwhelmingly dense, golden, warm tone, and even in the midst of the polyphony they're playing, its sound is searching, profound, teasing. I stand right in front of the low circus ring.

When they finish, I step up onto the stage. He smiles at me. But it's a smile without warmth; it's merely a drunken pose for the world around him which he probably retains even in his sleep. If he ever sleeps. I grab his microphone and turn it away from us. Behind us people stop eating. The waiters freeze in mid-stride.

"Roy Louber," I say.

His smile grows broader. He takes a drink from a big glass standing next to him.

"Thule. You once played in Thule."

"Thule…"

He pronounces it tentatively, searching his memory as if hearing it for the first time.

"In Greenland."

"Thule," he repeats.

"On the American base. At the Northern Star. What year was it?"

He smiles at me, mechanically shaking his trumpet. I have so little time to spare. I grab hold of his lapels and pull the big face down toward me.

" `Mr. PC.' You played `Mr. PC.' "

"They're dead, darling." His Danish is so thick that it's almost American English. "A long time ago. Dead and gone. Mr. P.C.-Paul Chambers."

"What year? What year was it?"

His gaze filters through glassy eyes, drunken and uncommunicative.

"Dead and gone. Me too, darling. Any time. Any time now."

He smiles. I let him go. He straightens up and pours spit out of the trumpet. Then I feel myself gently lifted down to the floor. The mechanic is standing behind me. "Start walking, Smilla."

I start walking. He vanishes again. I keep going straight ahead. In front of me is the door to the foyer.

"Smilla Jaspersen!"

We remember people by their clothes and by the places where we've seen them, so at first I don't recognize him. The dark blue suit and the silk tie don't go with his face. Then I realize that it's the Toenail. There's nothing shrill about him; his voice is low and commanding. Equally discreet and inescapable, they will follow me out to the car in a few minutes. I start walking faster. I've turned off my brain. On either side a man like him is now approaching, a self-confident and insistent figure.

I reach the foyer. Behind me the door slams shut. It's a large door, also made to resemble a bank vault door, so tall and heavy that it looks as if it serves merely a decorative purpose. Now it slams like the lid of a cigar box. The mechanic leans casually against it. It shuts out all noise. There is only a faint thud when someone sets his shoulder against it.

"Run, Smilla," he says. "Run. Lander's waiting out on the road."

I take a look around. There are no guests in the foyer. Behind the kiosk's magazine and cigarette displays a clerk yawns widely. Behind the information counter a girl is about to fall asleep over her PC. In back of me a man is nonchalantly leaning his six foot six frame against a steel door being jolted by small thuds. Everything is calm and quiet at Casino QSresund. A place with class. With style and cultured excitement and diversion at the green felt tables. The place where you make new friends and meet old ones.

Then I take off. I'm out of breath by the time I get to the parking lot.

"Your car, madam."

It's the same attendant as when we arrived.

"I've decided to have it scrapped. After the look you gave it."

There is no path for pedestrians. They hadn't planned on the eventuality that the casino might have guests who arrived on foot. So I run along the roadway, duck under the two white crossing gates, and come out on Sund Lane. A hundred yards ahead waits a red Jaguar with its taillights on.

Lander doesn't look at me as I get in. His face is tense and pale.

It's night and freezing cold. I don't remember ever seeing a big city gripped by frost like this. There is something defenseless and powerless about Copenhagen, as if a new ice age were on its way.

"What's an LMC?"

He drives stiffly and slowly, unused to the white, crystalline membrane that the cold has spread on the asphalt.

"Landing Mobile Craft. A flat-bottomed landing vessel. The kind used during the invasion of Normandy." I make him drive me to Harbor Street. He parks between the hydrofoil jetty and the old dock for the Bornholm boat. I ask him for his shoes and his cap. He gives them to me with no questions asked.

"Wait an hour," I say. "But no longer."

The ice is dark bottle-green in the night, with a thin membrane of snow that must have just fallen. I make my way down a vertical wooden ladder built into the wharf. It's very cold on the mirror of ice. My Burberry seems oddly stiff, Lander's shoes feel as thin as eggshells. But they're white. Along with my coat and the cap, they make me one with the ice. Just in case someone might be posted at the White Palace.

Along the bulwark small packs of ice have formed. I estimate the thickness to be over four inches. Thick enough for the harbor authorities to open an ice rink. The problem is the dark, coagulated slush in the channel itself.

People live so close together in Northern Greenland. Sleeping many to a room. Hearing and seeing everyone else at all times. The community is so small. There were 600 people spread among twelve settlements the last time I was home.

In contrast to this is nature. Every hunter, every child is gripped by a wild delirium whenever he walks or rides away from the settlement. First there's the feeling of a rising energy bordering on madness. Then comes a peculiar sense of clarity.

I know it's funny. But here in Copenhagen Harbor, at two in the morning, this feeling of clarity comes over me. As if it somehow came from the ice and the night sky and the relatively open space:

I think about what has happened to me since Isaiah's death.

I see Denmark before me like a spit of ice. It's drifting, but it holds us frozen solid in the ice floes, in a fixed position in relation to everyone else.

Isaiah's death is an irregularity, an eruption that produced a fissure. That fissure has set me free. For a brief time, and I can't explain how, I have been set in motion, I have become a foreign body skating on top of the ice.

The way I am now skating across Copenhagen Harbor, dressed in a clown hat and borrowed shoes.

From this angle a new Denmark comes into view. A Denmark that consists of those who have partially wrested themselves free of the ice.

Loyen and Andreas Licht, driven by different forms of greed.

Elsa Lübing, Lagermann, Ravn, bureaucrats whose strength and dilemma is their faith in a corporation, in the medical profession, in a government apparatus. But who, out of sympathy, eccentricity, or for some incomprehensible reason, have circumvented their loyalty to help me.

Lander, the rich businessman, driven by a desire for excitement and a mysterious sense of gratitude.

That is the beginning of a social cross section of Denmark. The mechanic is the skilled worker, the laborer. Juliane is the dregs. And I-who am I? Am I the scientist, the observer? Am I the one who has been given the chance to get a glimpse of life from the outside? From a point of view made up of equal parts of loneliness and objectivity?

Or am I only pathetic?

In the channel the grease ice is held together with a thin, dark, disintegrating crust of ice, what's called "rotten ice," dissolving and crumbling from below. I walk along the dark edge, down toward the White Palace, until I find a floe that's big enough. I step onto it and then onto the next. There's a slight movement with the current, down through the harbor, of maybe half a knot, rocking, lethal. I leap the last part of the way from floe to floe. I don't even get my feet wet.

The windows of the White Palace are dark. The entire complex seems to be in a sleep that also encompasses the walls, the playground, the stairways, the naked trunks of the trees. From the canal I come up behind the bicycle sheds, slowly and cautiously. I stop there.

I look at the parked cars. At the dark entryways. There is no movement. Then I look at the snow. The thin, fine layer of newly fallen snow.

There is no moon, so it takes time before I notice them. A single row of footprints. He came across the bridge and went behind the building. On this side of the playground the footprints are visible. A Vibram sole under a large person. They lead in under the shed roof in front of me, and they don't come back out.

Then I can feel him. There's no sound, no smell, nothing to see. But the tracks have made me resonant to his presence, to the certainty of a looming threat.

We wait for twenty minutes. When the cold makes me start shaking I pull away from the wall so I won't make any noise. Maybe I should give up and go back the way I came. But I stay. I detest fear. I hate being scared. There is only one path to fearlessness. It's the one that leads into the mysterious center of the terror.

For twenty minutes there is only soundless waiting. At 9" Fahrenheit. My mother could handle that. Most Greenlandic hunters can manage it any time. I can pull it off on rare occasions. For most Europeans it would be tmthinkable. They would shift their weight, clear their throat, cough, rustle their overcoat.

The man whose presence I sense less than a yard away must be convinced that he's alone, that no one can hear or see him. And yet he is as soundless as if he never existed.

But not for one second am I tempted to move, to give in to the cold. Like one long, internal shriek my senses tell me that someone is waiting there. That he's waiting for me.

I don't even hear him leave. I close my eyes for a moment because the cold has made them run. When I open them, a shadow has torn away from the shed roof and is moving off. A tall figure with a quick, fluid gait. And above his head, like a halo or a crown, something white, maybe a hat.

There are two ways to tag polar bears. The usual way is to stun them from a helicopter. The machine drops down directly over the bear, you lean out of the cockpit, and the instant that the air pressure from the rotor strikes the animal, it falls to the ground and you shoot.

Then there's the other method that we used on Svalbard. From a snowmobile-"the Viking way." You shoot with a custom air rifle made by Neiendamm in southern Jutland. This method requires you to get close, less than fifty yards away. Less than twenty-five is better. The moment the bear stops and turns around, you get a good look at it. Not one of those living carcasses that amuse you at the zoo, but a polar bear, the one from the Greenlandic coat of arms, colossal, three-quarters of a ton of muscle, bone, and teeth. With an extreme, lethal ability to explode. A wild animal that has existed for only 20,000 years, and in that time has known only two types of mammals: its own species and its prey.

I have never missed. We used bullets in which a gas device injected a large dose of Zolatil. The bear fell almost instantaneously. But not for a moment was I free of the panicky, hair-raising fear.

It's the same feeling now. What is moving away from me is only a shadow, a stranger, a person who is not aware of my presence. But the hair on my skin, which is numb from the cold, is standing on end like spines on a porcupine.

I reach the stairway through the basement rooms. The, mechanic's door is locked, and the tape is in place.

The door of Juliane's apartment is standing open. As I pass, she comes out onto the stairs.

"You're going away, Smilla."

She looks weak and helpless. But I hate her, anyway.

"Why didn't you tell me about Ving?" I say. "That he came and picked up Isaiah?"

She starts to cry. "The apartment. He gave us the apartment. He's a big shot with the housing authority. He could take it away again. He said that himself. Aren't you coming back?"

"Of course I am," I say.

It's true. I'll have to come back. She's the only thing left of Isaiah. Just as, for Moritz, I'm his only connection with my mother.

I walk up to my own floor. The tape hasn't been touched. I let myself in. Everything is the way I left it. I gather up only the most essential clothes. They fill two suitcases, which weigh so much that I would have to call a moving van. I try to repack them. It's difficult, because I don't dare turn on a light but work by the reflection from tile city's lights on the snow outside. Finally I limit myself to one large duffel bag. But not without heart-rending sacrifices.

Standing in the middle of the room, I take one last look around. I pick up Isaiah's cigar box and put it in the bag. I say a brief mental farewell to my home.

Then the phone rings.

Of course I should just let it ring. I promised the mechanic not to come up here. And I wouldn't want to talk to the police. Everything else can wait. I should just let it ring,. I have everything to lose and nothing to gain.

I loosen the tape and pick up the receiver. "Smilla…"

The voice is languid, almost distracted. But at the same t ime golden and resonant, like in a TV commercial. I have iirvcr heard it before. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I know that it belongs to the person who was standing less than a yard away from me only monents ago. I'm absolutely sure of it.

"Smilla… I know you're there."

I hear his breathing. Deep, calm. "Smilla…"

I put down the receiver, not on the phone, but on the table. I have to use both hands so I won't drop it. I sling my bag over my shoulder. No time to change shoes. I race out the door and down the dark stairway, out the front door and along Strand Street, across the bridge, and up Havne Street. We can't control ourselves every second of our lives. There comes a time, for each of us, when panic takes the upper hand.

Lander is waiting with the engine running. I throw myself into the passenger seat and cling to him.

"This is a good start," he says.

Slowly I get my breathing down to a tolerable level. "It was purely a one-time acknowledgment of sympathy," I tell him. "Don't let it go to your head."

I let him drive me all the way up to the house. For tonight, anyway, I've lost all desire to be alone in the dark. And I don't know where else to go. Moritz opens the door himself. Wearing a white terrycloth robe, white silk shorts, his hair rumpled, his eyes sleepy.

He looks at me. He looks at Lander, who is carrying my bag. He looks at the Jaguar. Amazement, jealousy, old rage, temper, curiosity, and unctuous indignation roam and struggle through his half-asleep brain. Then he rubs the stubble on his face.

"Are you coming in?" he says. "Or should I just hand the money through the mail slot?"